1N/2D Backpacking in Yosemite High Country (2022)

D and I are going to the South Island of New Zealand this Nov 2022 and have booked permits for the Milford Track, which is a 3-night, 4-day backpacking trip through the Milford Sound. Neither of us has any backpacking experience; we've car-camped three times, and only done one short, and relatively easy, overnight backpacking trip in San Jose.

We only had one October weekend to fit in some backcountry backpacking training before the New Zealand trip. All the campsites in the Bay Area were already full, so our only options were to really far out. Yosemite is always an amazing option, and after two Fridays of waking up at 7AM, bleary-eyed, to compete for permits to camp at for Sunrise Lakes, we finally got it. This trip was an ADVENTURE and honestly, for most of it, we were either unsure if we would make it to the trail or if we would be able to finish it.

Feel free to skip to any of the sections below, or read through the whole thing if you wanna ride the rollercoaster with us:

1. Overview of the trail
2. Obstacle 1: a possibly popped tire
3. Obstacle 2: a trip to urgent care
4. Day 1: camp at Sunrise Lake
5. Night 1: an evening bathroom adventure
6. Day 2: Long Meadow, Cathedral Lakes, and the end
7. Learnings

Overview of the trail

I've spent a lot of time scrolling through AllTrails over the past month and the posted trails on the app were either too short (<8 miles) or too long (>20 miles). I wanted something in-between that would challenge us but not kill us, so I customized my own loop using AllTrails' "Create Map" feature. If you've never used this feature, it's AWESOME. You draw your own map and create waypoints, and AllTrails will calculate the estimated mileage and elevation gain for you -- highly recommend if you'd like to do something similar to what we did!

I was able to create a loop that hits several lakes in one go: the trail starts at the Sunrise Lakes Trailhead, goes up to the Sunrise High Sierra Camp, down to Long Meadow via the John Muir Trail, up to Cathedral Lakes, back down to join the Tenaya Lake trail, and finishes along the left side of Tenaya Lake to bring us back to the Sunrise Lakes Trailhead. The trail is about 15 miles with ~2,600ft of elevation gain. Our initial goal was to camp at one of the Sunrise Lakes for one night, and Cathedral for the second night. This meant we'd only be doing about 5 miles/day. You can see the Alltrails map I made below:

However, we got a call and email from the park ranger three days before the start of our trip informing us that every year starting October 15, overnight parking on Tioga Road is prohibited. This caught us off-guard because there weren't any posted alerts or warnings on either the Yosemite NPS site or Recreation.gov when we were booking our wilderness permit. I finally found that information buried in a sentence on the NPS site here.

Our planned Fri - Sun trip became an overnight Fri - Sat trip. At first we contemplated whether we could still drive out early Friday morning (~5am) as originally planned and make a 9-mile push to Cathedral Lakes instead of camping at Sunrise lakes 3-4 miles in. It was a little risky given our lack of experience, so we ultimately decided to book a hotel in Groveland that was ~3 hours from home and ~2 hours from the trailhead for Thursday night, so we could hit the trail first thing Friday morning and attempt to reach Cathedral Lakes with the time gained from a shorter drive.

You could argue that the universe was screaming at us to not go on this trip with how chaotic the rest of the journey ended up being, but it was still SO worth it. Just a little preview here:

Obstacle 1: a possibly popped tire

We started our drive to Groveland on Thursday around 7:30PM. An hour into our drive, the low tire pressure light came on. Ugh. We pulled over at the next gas station and started measuring tire pressures -- one seemed to be slightly lower than the rest. We used the air station to pump all the tires with a little extra air and did a second round of checks. None of the tire pressures had changed. Maybe the air pump was broken?

Across the street was another gas station with an air pump, so we moved there. Did another round of checks, tried pumping air again. Somehow the front-right tire that already had lower pressure dropped again in the past 20 minutes, even though we just pumped it with air. It was down from 31 PSI to 25. This was starting to get worrisome, but maybe there was something wrong with this air pump too?

We went back across the street to give the first air pump another try -- maybe we did something wrong the first time -- and the tire pressure dropped again! It was now 21 PSI. I found something online that said you should always reset your tire pressure calibration system after every tire rotation and change. I checked with D whether we'd done this recently, and he said he had in the past couple months or so. Okay, well, shit. Maybe it's a real leak. Both of us were hoping that maybe this was one of the other few times on past road trips where the TPMS alert was a fluke.

We spent 15 minutes trying to find an open auto/tire repair shop (there were none open past 6PM). There was only one a mile away: a "24-hr tire shop" we found on Google Maps that took us to the parking lot of an apartment complex. Very sketchy, so we did not pursue that further.

Our options were:

1. YOLO it and drive the 100+ miles and 2+ hours to Groveland and hope that there was a tire repair shop open early Friday morning in town. Hope that we won't get a flat during the drive and need to call midnight roadside assistance (a good reminder to us that we should sign up for AAA)
2. Take the L and drive home, wake up early, and find a tire shop first thing in the morning.

We decided on the latter. It was frustrating that we had to forfeit the hotel payment, the gas, and the time, but we didn't want to be stranded in the middle of the highway all night.

We went to bed as soon as we got home. The alarm went off at 5am and we were out of the house around 6am. At 7am, we pulled into a Firestone shop that was the earliest tire shop open on our route. The mechanic we spoke to said that since we'd already been driving for a while and the pressure hasn't dropped again since, it's likely that things were fine and we just needed some extra air. We asked if they could take a look at our tires to be sure, but they said they were slammed for the day, so the most they could do was pump up the tires. This time, however, all of our tires got up to 34PSI no problem. Maybe the air pumps from last night were just broken...? We reset the calibration system and crossed our fingers that that was the end of it.

Obstacle 2: a trip to Urgent Care

Half an hour after leaving Firestone, D starts to complain about shortness of breath. He did seem to be taking a lot more deep breaths than usual and has a history of lung problems, so we didn't want to take any chances. We stopped at the nearest urgent care center in Stockton. The last thing we'd want is for D to have lung failure during a 15-mile backpacking trip at high elevation 😅.

There was already a line of people waiting for the doors to open at 8am. Only three people were allowed in at a time, and it was taking each person 15-20min to get past the front desk. By the time we got up front, it was just past 9am. The person taking in our forms asked us why we were here, and we told her it was to have D's lungs checked. She looked at us, confused, and said that they don't actually offer most typical urgent care services and only handle worker's comp injuries -- #holup, WHAT? Why was this place called an urgent care center at all? Why was there no information on their website, on Google, and around the building that they can't perform basic medical services like a breathing test?! We were turned away after waiting over an hour to be seen. If you want to know which urgent care to avoid, this is the one.

We tried calling a Sutter Health hospital, which was in-network with health insurance. The wait would be 2 hours long and we may still need a referral to get services such as X-rays done. The next best urgent care center was 20-minutes away in Manteca. This urgent care center was amazing. No wait, only had a co-pay, and the doctor that saw us was so patient, kind, thorough, and knowledgeable. He even put in a stat order on a chest X-ray at the hospital nearby to make sure we'd get our results within the day, if not within the next couple of hours. Getting the X-ray was also super fast; we were both so relieved. All in all, we spent maybe 30-45min tops between doing patient intake and getting the X-ray done. Click here for the Manteca Urgent Care we went to.

It was now 11am and both of us were starting to wonder if we'd be able to do the hike at all since we needed to wait for results. At worst, we'd just barely make it to camp at Sunrise right around sunset; on Saturday, we'd need to hike the remaining 12 miles or just head back down from Sunrise. We decided to start driving rather than bum around in the area waiting for results, and crossed our fingers that we'd have service when the doctor called.

We were on highway 120 and just caught a small stretch of service when D got the call from the doctor. He was clear! YES! Turns out, the sudden case of shortness of breath was likely caused by intense anxiety brought on by the work stress D's been feeling the past several weeks. Something for D to work on going forward -- at least we can do the trip now with peace of mind.

Day 1: camp at Sunrise Lake

We picked up our wilderness permit from the Big Oak Flat Information Center and were finally, finally in the park. From the ranger station, it was another one hour drive down Tioga road to the trailhead. By the time we parked and put our packs on, it was 2:45pm and the sun was sitting low on the treetops.

But we were finally backpacking!!

The trail to Sunrise Lakes shares the same path as the Cloud's Rest trail for the first couple of miles. Both of us did Cloud's Rest as a day hike last October, and all we remembered was how incredible the view was at the end. We had forgotten what an absolute slog the first section of the trail is: a fucking stair-master where you gain over 1,000-ft in 2.5 miles. Our packs were at their heaviest, somewhere around 25-30lbs, and we were already wheezing 15 minutes in.

It was brutal, but we did it. We made it to lower Sunrise Lake around 4:30pm in spite of our glacial pace of 1.5mph and the dozen or so breaks we took along the way. Our goal was to camp at upper Sunrise Lake, which was another 0.6 miles from the lower lake, because we wanted to reduce as much mileage as possible for Saturday. I guess we could've just done a cute, 6-mile RT hike to Sunrise and back and not have worried about the mileage, but both of us were determined to get the full experience and do the entire 15-mile loop.

Upper Sunrise was another ~200ft climb. We got to the lake and realized that there were actually very few spots you could camp at. Most of the land surrounding the lake was meadow, which you aren't allowed to camp on, since trampling meadows is bad for the ecosystem. It was 5pm now and the trees were blocking most of the light. We knew the first lake had good spots, so we decided to suck it up and hike the 0.6 miles back. It was rough. Every step counts, and we had already done an extra 1.2 miles.

The temperature was dropping pretty quickly. The day temperature was a beautiful 64F, but the low for the night was projected to be around 30F. When we started setting up camp around 5:45pm, I'd guess that it was already in the low 40's.

Of the three lakes (there's also a middle lake off the trail), the lower lake is definitely the more beautiful one. The water perfectly mirrored the granite peak across the lake, and the setting sun cast the most perfect, orange and pink glow. It was breathtaking.

Dinner was rehydrated vegetarian lasagna from Backpacker's Pantry: it was pretty good! Rehydrating takes double the time every 5,000-ft above sea-level you go, and we were over 9,000-ft of altitude, so we had to decide if we wanted to wait the full 30 minutes for fully-hydrated, but potentially lukewarm/cool food. We decided to eat slightly-dehydrated but hot lasagna instead. The crunchy, powdery vegetables and cheese granules weren't the most enjoyable favorite texture, but it felt amazing to have something warm in the body.

The sun set around 6:30pm and we were enveloped in darkness by 8pm. I have some regrets about not sucking it up to sit in the 30F weather for some astrophotography, but I really just wanted to be warm and in my sleeping bag. We did stargaze for about ten minutes, and it was incredible. No light pollution, no moon rising yet. Just stars. The Milky Way was this ghostly river winding from horizon to horizon. It felt like there were more stars than there was empty space in the universe. My eyes couldn't get enough, but my body was screaming for me to get into the sleeping bag and out of the bitter cold.

Night 1: an evening bathroom adventure

When we were buying our sleeping bags, I thought it was a bunch of poppycock that the men's temperature ratings were the same as a higher temperature rating for women, because "women get cold more easily" (according to the REI person we spoke to). A men's bag rated for 15F has the same temperature range as the women's bag for 30F. I'm a much sweatier sleeper than D, so I was like, yeah, a 30F bag should be more than good -- maybe even too hot.

Fifteen minutes after crawling into our sleeping bags, I realized that I was cold. Really cold. I started putting on layers piecewise. First, a thermal. Second, a base layer underneath the thermal and my sleeping shirt. Then, still cold, one of those reflective,"heat-tech" long sleeves. Threw on a hat as well. I was already using a sleeping bag liner and had an all-season camping pad too! When we started our trip, I was worried that I had overpacked by bringing six layers with me on the trip. Turns out, I needed to wear four of them to feel comfortable enough.

My face hurt most of the night, and every breath hurt. If y'all have suggestions on how to keep your face warm while camping, please let me know. Then there was the pain in my shoulders from sleeping on my side. I mostly sleep on my back, but toss a lot and tend roll onto my sides. I'd roll onto my side, groggy with sleep, and realize minutes later that I was in a lot of fucking pain. I woke up, unable to focus on anything else and just lay awake. And I had finally accumulated enough warmth that the thought of unzipping the bag, then the tent, and then fish for my painkillers in the backpack that we left right outside the tent entrace seemed like an insurmountable feat. After what seemed like an hour or two of blinking through the searing pain, I finally gave up and got the aspirin. I was so mad at myself for not doing it sooner.

And then it happened. It happened to D first and I was praying that it wouldn't happen to me. I wanted to get through this trail without having to do it. But just minutes after D put his headlamp on, grabbed his shovel and tissues, and left the tent, I felt my colon rumble. I squeezed my eyes shut, telling myself it was just in my head, and tried to go back to sleep. D came back after a while and snuggled back into his bag. I thought I could override the call of nature, but the whisper slowly grew into scream. "I...I think I need to go poop", I whispered to D.

I whimpered as the warmth in my bag quickly dissipated as I unzipped it. I grabbed my shovel and stepped out into the night. D was very kind about accompanying me, since I was scared of walking into the woods alone.

No one told me that one of the hardest parts about pooping in the woods is digging your cat hole. There was no loose soil or dirt -- just densely-packed layers of roots that went deeper than the 6-inches I needed to dig. My fingers froze around my shovel, locked into a vice-like grip around the shitty metal trowel we bought that only had a tongue and no handle. My hands were burning from the pain and I eventually gave up at around 4-5 inches. I did my business as quickly as I could so that D and I could burrow back into our sleeping bags.

It was only 2AM after this expedition. There were still four long hours until sunrise and I didn't know what to do with myself. I felt so awake. I could no longer fall asleep. I wondered when and if the aspirin would kick in more, since the pain came back.

Somehow, we made it to the morning. I had never been more excited for the sun to rise so a new day could start, even though I didn't get more than two hours of sleep the whole night. Does anyone actually ever sleep well backapcking?

Day 2: Long Meadow, Cathedral Lakes, and the end

We weren't ready to hit the trail until 9AM. We had gotten up before all the other campers, but were the last to leave because we were just slow, I guess. It was a little concerning given we needed to finish the last 12 miles of the trail today.

The sun was already high and beating down on us when we started. We pushed our way back up to the Upper Sunrise Lake and had to stop for a granola break since already hungry, just half an hour since leaving the campsite.

Past the lake was another steep, 2-mile climb up to the Sunrise High Sierra Camp (HSC). You come over a small mountain pass before dropping down to the camp and into the Long Meadow valley. We both agreed that we should join the lottery for a spot at the HSC when it reopens next year; the camps provide a shared canvas tent, breakfast, dinner, and even flush toilets!! Moreover, the views of Long Meadow and the backcountry are absolutely stunning.

Such a stunning section of the trail -- and by far the easiest! We were so grateful for the relatively flat, three miles before the next ascent to reach the Cathedral Lakes.

D was having a really tough time and we were stopping every 10-20 minutes or so for a break. I felt so bad that he was in so much pain when we still had so much of the trail left to do. What a trooper! I had estimated that we'd be able to finish the whole trail around 4PM, but now I wasn't so sure.

By the time we made it up to the Columbia Finger, it was already close to 1PM. We took a longer break here so D could give his shoulders and back a rest before continuing onwards to Cathedral Lakes. The views of the Yosemite backcountry were something to behold. Jagged peaks dotted the foreground and waves of granite undulated far into the horizon. This was a whole side of Yosemite neither of us have seen, and I doubt many ever get to unless they're hiking the JMT or PCT. It was like being let in on a secret that few others have been privy to.

And just as D was about to give up -- he'd been asking every few minutes how close we were to Upper Cathedral Lake --, we finally saw the tippy tops of Cathedral Peak piercing the horizon. Our original plan was to eat lunch at the upper lake, but we were pretty behind schedule. We decided we'd check out the upper lake for a little and push forward to the lower lake.

I don't think I will ever get tired of Yosemite. Every blink of the eye and turn of the head reveals something beautiful.

We continued on to lower lake from here. The lake was supposed to be only another 3/4-mile from the upper lake, and all downhill. When we hit 3/4 miles with no lake in sight, I found it curious, but wrote it off as an underestimation on AllTrails' part. Then we hit 1 mile and started to go uphill. At 1.2 miles, something was definitely wrong. But we hadn't passed any turn-off and I hadn't seen any other trails branching from the one we were on.

D said he thought he saw a trail a little while back, but it looked closed off, so he didn't think to mention it. Sure enough, I checked the AllTrails and we had somehow missed the turn. Okay, guess we gotta turn back. I kept the AllTrails map open the entire time and was very confused when our dot was hovering right at the intersection and no trail was visible.

It turns out that the "reforestation" notice also contained a notice about the old trail to Lower Cathedral Lake closing indefinitely, and the trail was rerouted to the John Muir Trail, which we had just come down from to find this trail. My face still bunches up in self-pity while writing this because every. step. counts. Every. step. hurts. We had essentially added another 1.5 miles of uphill climbing, and an extra hour to our 12-mile, 8-hour hike and we were already behind schedule! Stress!!

We once again, turned around, and headed back up the hill onto the new trail to the lower lake. This detour was an extra 0.5-mile longer than the old trail, on top of the backtracking we had to do.

We were whipped when we reached Lower Cathedral Lake. It was now 2:30PM. We needed to keep moving, but also really needed a break and food. It was nice to get to spend some time at the lake (even if my brain was screaming that we didn't have time). We sat in the "less exciting" part of the lake, so I didn't leave with too many photos that I really liked.

We had this peanut-butter-trail-mix spread that came out of a squeeze bottle for lunch. Very efficient and economical meal -- easy to pack, contains tons of protein from the nuts, and clean to eat. I think, though, all the oil from it was, you could say, too lubricating. Not even 10-minutes into leaving the lake, I needed to poop again. Finding a spot near Cathedral Lakes is not easy. There are so many side trails, so many people constantly passing through, and so little brush to hide behind. It took me 10 minutes to climb up and far enough from the trail to find some boulders that would only shield me from certain angles. Another thing no one tells you about pooping outdoors is scrambling to finish digging your hole before you crap your pants. Don't worry, I dug it in time.

Unfortunately, I didn't get out what I felt like I needed to, and right after coming down from the hill, I felt that rumble in my tummy again. But we didn't have time!! So I decided to just hold it and hoped I'd be able to finish the last 6-miles in one piece.

Even though the rest of the hike was all downhill, it was sketchy. We've done the Cathedral Lakes hike before, and neither of us remember feeling unsafe on the trail. There were a lot of fallen trees blocking the trail this time. A surprising amount of scree made the trail slippery and we slipped multiple times descending. Some sections that were completely unprotected, i.e. right on the edge of a drop-off. There was a short section where you had to scooch around the face of a boulder, a steep drop-off, and only had a foot's width of space for each step. My pack was briefly pushed around by the rock and a tree branch, and I freaked out momentarily thinking the push would knock me off the cliff. Luckily, I kept my foothold and was able to get back onto the dirt path.

You could see Tenaya Lake coming down from Cathedral Lakes. Getting to the lake access trail that would take us back to the car seemed, and was, still so far away. The time was 4:30PM and there were 4 miles left to go.

When we finally finished the Cathedral Lakes section and joined onto the Tenaya Lake trail, the forest was alreayd dark. We were really fighting for the last strands of sunlight. We decided that we should try to hitchhike back to the car if there were any opportunities to safely get onto Tioga Road. We had headlamps, but our feet were in so much pain and our bodies were on the verge of collapse.

The trail unfortunately never got close enough to the road for us to feasibly get onto the shoulder for hitchhiking. So we pushed onward to Tenaya Lake, where we were desperately hoping there were people still by the lakeshore. By the time we got to the lake, the sun was inches above the horizong. It was close to 6:30PM and we had already far exceeded the mileage we planned for. We had done 18 miles by the time we reached Tenaya Lake due to all the backtracking, and it would be 19 miles if we hiked the lakeshore trail back to the car. The whole trip was only supposed to be 15 miles. There was no way we would make it back to the car before 7:30PM in our condition.

We decided to walk down the lakeshore to find someone who could give us a ride back to our car. Both of us spotted a friendly-looking couple at the same time. We both started hobbling and sprinting towards them, yelling "EXCUSE ME!!!" until they turned around. I was so relieved they didn't just run away at the sight of two giant, strange blobs screaming at them from a distance.

They were the sweetest people. We told them about our situation and they were so kind to agree to drive us back to the car at the other end of the lake. We were so relieved. The four of us had a lovely chat for the 4-minute drive to our parking lot and it refreshed my faith in humanity a little bit.

We were finally back at the car. It was now 7PM. The sun had set. We were safe and so ready to go home.

Learnings

• Backpacking is fucking hard.
• We need to start lifting weights and do more cardio.
• Pack less -- we brought a bunch of wipes and hygiene-related stuff only to realize that at the end of the day, we were fine being dirty for a night if it meant we could crawl into our warm sleeping bags sooner. That's what bag liners are for!
• Double the time we think it'll take us to finish a trail -- I estimated 6 hours, but it took us 10 hours total.
• Start promptly and just hustle to get started faster.
• Have moleskin handy for blisters during the trail -- we got quite a few.
• Read all signage and posted notices so you don't backtrack for a closed trail.
• Pretty pictures really do not tell the whole story.
• 100% would backpack again; the solitude and time spent in nature is unbeatable.